Turtle Head 龜頭時報: 9/2021

An hour and a half after leaving Zhonghe, our van full of Burners and supplies bounced along the road to the front gate for Turtle Burn, 2021. “Welcome Home!” Gypsy called out as she ran to meet us, wrapping me up in a hug that said it all: We were home. We rang the bell and announced our arrival as former Burgins. None of us had ever attended a Burning Man event before, but we were excited to be there.

For me, though, while I’d never been to a Burn before, there was something almost eerily familiar about Turtle Burn. No, there wasn’t an uncanniness to the setting – I’d never yet been to the campsite. And it wasn’t exactly something to do with the people, only a handful of whom I’d met. No, it was a feeling that ran deeper than that and reminded me of a time long ago when I’d been a child growing up in Oregon.

The barge had finished crossing over to Camp Westwind, and 9-year-old me ran out to meet the campers who’d just floated to. Along with a handful of other organizers and their kids, I’d arrived a day early to stock the kitchen and make sure everything was ready for Chautauqua.

It’s a family event every September in Oregon, just for homeschoolers and their children (Oregon homeschoolers are cut very much from the same cloth as the delightful California weirdoes who gave birth to Burning Man). We slept in cabins a 10-minute walk from the Pacific Ocean and spent time at the central lodge, playing games, attending workshops run by other campers (everyone was expected to lead something), and cooking food together (each camper took two volunteer shifts so we could make sure the event ran smoothly and the work was shared). We hiked and roamed, read and played. The same ethos that ties Burners together – the 10 Principles – existed in an unspoken form there. No money was exchanged. Everyone worked together to create the event. We were responsible to our kin and to the larger Chautauqua family that gathered and then dispersed each year. We were radically ourselves on that little chunk of beach every fall.

Ringing that bell at Turtle Burn jostled awake a part of me that had lain dormant for so long. She stretched and yawned and blinked herself into awareness once more. While so many found themselves unabashedly adults at Turtle Burn, I felt almost the opposite. It was like the child I had once been suddenly found herself – not on the beach as she expected – but standing in the middle of the woods and not quite sure how she’d gotten there. Different people, different place, but the feeling was the same. Suddenly and unexpectedly, I actually seemed to have found myself at home once more. There’s something in the world we create at Turtle Burn that bears for me deep echoes of Chautauqua. So, I was a virgin Burner, and yet I’d been burning since I was a child, unaware of the other forms that world took and where else I would find it.